Various Flavors of Coffee (47 page)

“How does a train driver come to grow coffee?” I asked, astonished.

He laughed. “In Brazil, everyone grows coffee. I rent a little land with my wages, so I took up the maize and planted a few beans.With half the money I make, I buy maize; with the rest, I’ll buy more land and plant more trees. It’s the only way to make money.”

“Aren’t you worried about the government destroying crops?” “They pay compensation, don’t they? Well then, it’s all the same

to me.”

At last
we reached the stop that marked the edge of Howell’s plantations.There was a small platform, and on the other side of it another, smaller train was waiting.

“Howell’s,” my driver said.“He must have sent it down for you.” I stepped into a luxurious Pullman carriage, its glass windows engraved as finely as those of any West End hotel. Porters hoisted my bags into the luggage van, a whistle blew, and the train glided

up into the hills.

The view was still of endless straight lines. But along with the coffee, one glimpsed other signs of human activity. There were roads cut through these fields: tractors and carts trundled along them, generating clouds of that colored dust. Men marched along in groups—work gangs, presumably, but unlike the lone peons I had glimpsed occasionally in the lower hills, these were wearing smocks, each group of one color, while the foremen had white bandanas tied around their heads. Water glistened in irrigation

channels, while from time to time we passed huge terraces for dry-ing the washed beans. I found myself wondering how simple farms, or even what Hector and I had tried to set up in Africa, could ever compete with an operation as vast as this.

The train drew into another station.Warehouses and some offices clustered around a central piazza. The porters were already unloading my luggage, so I followed it, and them, toward a long, low mansion which overlooked the estate.

“Mr.Wallis?”

The speaker was a small, swarthy man. Despite the heat he was wearing the full dress of an English bank official—starched collar, dark suit, spectacles, pince-nez.

“Yes?” I said.

“Sir William says you are to state your business to me.” “I’m afraid my message is for Sir William only.”

“Sir William is not here.” “Then I will have to wait.”

The man frowned.“That may not be permitted.”

“Well, you can hardly ask him whether he permits it unless he is here, can you?” I said loftily.“You had better find somewhere to put me up until he arrives.”

“I’ll see to this, Novelli,” a curt voice interjected.

I turned. A young man was walking toward us. He was rather less formally dressed than the man he had spoken to, but Novelli nodded obediently and withdrew.

“Jock Howell,” the young man said. “And you must be Wallis.

Do you mind telling me what the devil you want?” “I have a message for your father.”

“I’ll give it to him.”

I shook my head. “You can tell him that it’s from Samuel Pinker. But I can deliver it only to him in person.”

The young man scowled and stalked away. For an hour I remained where I was, until he returned.

“Follow me.”

I followed him into the mansion. In the hall—lined with cool marble, the windows shuttered against the humidity outside—he knocked on a door.

“Come in,” a voice answered.

I recognized Sir William Howell from the portrait on every pack of Howell’s Planter’s Premium. In the flesh he was smaller than I had imagined; leaner, more intimidating.

“Mr.Wallis,” he said.“Shut the door, please.”

I turned to do as he asked and found my way blocked by the son, who looked uncertain which side of the closed door he should be on.

“I’ll call you if I want you,” the old man told him brusquely.

When we were alone Sir William looked me up and down. “I hope you haven’t come all this way just to see what a proper plantation looks like. I fear for you it is rather too late for that.”

He clearly knew all about my own abortive attempts to grow coffee.“I have a letter for you.”

“From Mr. Pinker of Narrow Street?” He sounded amused. “Yes.”

He held out his hand and I placed the letter in it. Picking up a letter knife from the desk, he slit the envelope open and pulled out its contents—two pages covered in Pinker’s tidy writing.

Howell read it through once, and grunted—I thought, with surprise. Then he glanced at me and read it again. This time he seemed to weigh it more carefully.

Putting the letter down, he looked out of the window. I followed his gaze. The view was of a great expanse of plantation— twenty or thirty miles of it. “And you really know nothing of the contents of this letter?” Pinker must have said so in the text, since I had not.

“Nothing whatsoever,” I agreed.

He said abruptly,“What sort of man is he? Pinker, I mean?”

“He’s clever,” I said.“But it’s a particular kind of cleverness. He likes to dream—to imagine possibilities that no one else has seen. And then, more often than not, he’s right.”

Howell nodded slowly. “Stay here for a few days. Jock will show you around. My reply to your employer will require some thought.”

They were
as good as their word. For three days I was allowed to witness every facet of their operation, from the giant nursery beds which alone occupied more than a hundred acres, to the vast sheds in which the beans were pulped and processed. Even the terraces on which the beans were spread to dry in the sun were made of concrete, so that the red dust did not taint the finished product. The men who walked amongst them turning the beans with huge rakes went barefoot, their bodies lacquered with sweat.

There were two sorts of workers, Negroes and Italians. The Negroes were former slaves, Jock told me, but since abolition the company had recruited only Italian immigrants. The Italians worked harder, he said; partly because they had to pay off the heavy costs of their transportation, and partly because they were from better racial stock—by which he meant, I took it, that they were closer in color to himself.

“What happened to the Negroes they replaced?” I asked.

Jock shrugged. I understood him perfectly: once they were no longer slaves, they were no longer his concern.

The workers were housed in villages called
colonos,
each of which contained a bakehouse and a store where they could spend their wages. There was even a schoolroom, where the children were taught to count—counting, Jock Howell assured me, being one of the most useful skills a peon could acquire. All children, of whatever age, were excused school if their parents were on picking duty, the lowest berries on the bushes—those in reach of their

little hands—being routinely left for them. Picking went on late into the night. More than once I myself saw families tramping wearily back to their villages in the dark, their heads bearing great baskets of picked beans, while a small child slumbered on the woman’s hip.

“There are a great many children here,” I commented. “Of course. My father has always encouraged families.” “He likes children?”

Jock shot me a sideways look. “In a manner of speaking.These children will be our future laborers. And for the workers, there is no greater spur to industry than having hungry mouths to feed.”

“What happens if they get into difficulties?”

“We never let anyone starve. A peon can always take a cash advance against his family’s future earnings.”

I remembered Pinker, and his time-bargains.“And how are the debts repaid?”

“By the children themselves, if necessary, from their wages.” “So these children inherit their parents’ debts? And start their

working lives in debt themselves?”

He shrugged. “It is better than slavery. And the workers seem happy. Judge for yourself.”

It was true that the workers did seem contented with their lot, although I noticed that wherever Jock and I went we were accompanied by
capangas,
guards armed with rifles and machetes.

In the mansion
there were several white women who acted as maids and servants. I expressed my surprise that the estate had been able to recruit them, so far from the city.

Jock frowned. “Those women aren’t white, Robert. They’re black.”

“I distinctly saw a white face in the kitchen as we passed this morning—”

“That was Hettie. And she certainly isn’t white. She’s a mustifino.”

I wasn’t familiar with the term, so he explained for my benefit. A mixed-race child was called a mulatto; the offspring of a white person and a mulatto was a quadroon; the child of a white person and a quadroon was a mustee, and so on, through octaroons, quin-troons and mustifinoes.

“But where,” I began, and then stopped. There was only one English family in Dupont. The question I had been going to ask was superfluous.

“Here, this
may interest you,” Jock said, leading me toward one of the vast processing sheds.“It’s where the coffee is sorted.”

Inside, a long table snaked continuously around the room.At the back of the table was an open box like a trough. Sitting at the table were over a hundred Italian girls, from about ten to twenty years old. Each girl reached into the box, pulling out a handful of green beans which she spread in front of her. Then she examined them, picked out any bad ones and tossed them into another box behind her, at the same time sweeping the good beans through a hole in the table into a sack below. A high proportion of the girls were quite pretty, with the lustrous black eyes and dark skin of Italian peasants. As Jock and I entered the shed they looked up at us.They dug their bare pink toes into the sacks, and it seemed to me that they remained very conscious of our gaze as they continued in their work. “Any of them would be glad to catch your eye,” Jock murmured in my ear. “Should you find yourself at a loose end during

your stay . . .”

I found myself
at a loose end quite soon, as it happened. But try as I might to enjoy my pretty dark-skinned companion, I could

never quite shake off the memory of Fikre, writhing on top of me in false ecstasy.And I could not shake off the disturbing sense that, whatever I did, Emily was watching it all, too—cool and sardonic:
So this is what you do with your whores and concubines.

In the evenings
Sir William and his wife joined us for dinner. They kept a lavish table, with uniformed servants waiting on us hand and foot, refilling crystal goblets engraved with Howell’s monogram, an elegant
H
motif, while Sir William spoke about the problems facing his country.

“You see this food, Wallis?” he said, indicating the spread in front of us. “Barely a mouthful has been grown in Brazil. As far as our peons are concerned, food is something that arrives on ships.” “They are quite right, of course,” his son pointed out. “The coffee boats might as well bring grain on their inward voyage as

travel empty.”

“And so this country becomes ever more reliant on coffee,” his father said. “Every peasant grows a few bushes. If we have over-production it is not because of efficient estates like ours: it is because of all these little, low-grade producers, who are protected from competition by the valorization program.” He stared into his wine. “Perhaps he is right, after all. Perhaps we must destroy what is weak, before we can build what is strong.”

I did not need to ask who Sir William meant by “he.”

On another occasion
he said, “You know, Wallis, I was one of those who supported the abolition of slavery here.”

I had not known that, and said so.

“Slavery is ultimately an inefficient way to run a plantation—it is like trying to work with donkeys rather than mules.The present system is far cheaper.”

“How can it be?” I asked, puzzled.

“If you own a slave, you have capital tied up in him.Then you must feed him when he is sick, and pay someone to beat him when he is lazy, and feed his children even before they are old enough to be useful. . . . Abolition was a great change, and many opposed it for that reason, but it has turned out to be the best thing Brazil ever did.” He drummed his fingers on the tablecloth. “Your employer, I think, is someone who understands about change.”

“Indeed,” I said,“it is his great preoccupation.”

“I will write my answer to him tomorrow.You will be able to leave by mid-day—I will have Novelli order the train.”

The following morning
he handed me an envelope addressed to Samuel Pinker.“You will know what to do with this.”

“Indeed,” I said, taking it.

“There is something else . . . You were shown, I believe, some coffee you were told was being dumped at sea?” I nodded. “You should know that our government is far too corrupt, and too greedy, to destroy anything that has a monetary value.Take a closer look, Mr.Wallis, and pass on what you learn to Mr. Pinker.”

Back in São Paulo
I went down to the docks, without a government guide this time, and made some inquiries.There was a con-voy of barges scheduled to dump sacks out at sea that evening. I found a fisherman with a small skiff, and paid him handsomely to take me out behind them.

Sure enough, about two miles out the barges pulled up alongside a freighter and began unloading their cargo onto the larger vessel.When they were done, the freighter steamed off toward the south while the barges returned to shore. I had managed to get

close enough to see the freighter’s name—the SS
Nastor—
and back on dry land I set about discovering what I could about her.

She was registered to a shipping syndicate; a syndicate, my researches soon told me, which included the son of the Secretary for Agriculture. What was more fascinating still was that she was bound for Great Britain by way of Arabia.

I could not conceive of any reason why a coffee ship should sail from one coffee-producing country to another—except for one.

I telegraphed
Jenks, who tracked down a consignment of coffee from one of the
Nastor
’s previous trips. It was as we suspected; the sacks might be labeled mocca, but their contents were Brazilian. The SS
Nastor
had been shipping beans to Arabia. There, after a brief interval, they were reloaded and sent on to Britain, to be sold at what was a low price for mocca but a rather good price for Brazilian.